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AutoCAD Licence Manager

AutoCAD is an indispensable feature of the working life of many engineers the world over. No small number of these users will have experienced license denials from time to time and as the person who is responsible for managing or administering these licenses, one of the license admin’s priorities is to prevent denials from occurring or at least keep them down to an acceptable number. Managing licenses without some form of automation is virtually impossible, which is why vendors of engineering software supply a license manager with their proprietary software. The software eases the administrative burden of access management and automates the management and monitoring of licenses.

The AutoDesk License Manager

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AutoCAD uses the widely-used Flexera Manager from specialist company Flexera as its license manager, which resides on the license server (the license manager itself can also be referred to as the ‘license server’, the two terms often being used interchangeably). This software controls and monitors concurrent license usage to ensure that the customer is complying with the contractual agreement with AutoDesk. The monitoring aspect is especially important since AutoDesk introduced Token-Flex, where the division of the AutoCAD day into 8-minute timeslots and the times when the license is pulled and released can have a material cost impact.

While AutoDesk’s license manager software provides basic information to help you administer licenses, it is primarily designed to control checkout of Autodesk licenses, highlight any gaps in compliance and calculate billing for customers with a “pay per use” software model. But many features that could help you manage licenses better and optimize your license inventory are not available in the AutoCAD License Manager software. Fortunately there is OpenLM, a license tool designed to help the user organization manage AutoCAD and other Autodesk products, as well as a comprehensive range of engineering software from other vendors.

What OpenLM can do for You

OpenLM takes the challenge up where the AutoDesk license software leaves off, giving you the opportunity to optimize your AutoCAD licenses to their maximum, while improving access and productivity at the same time. The company’s return on investment is soon realised when using OpenLM because of its ability to identify lack of use, inefficiency and overspend, as well as containing toolsets that help to mitigate or remove these problems. Here are some of the value-added features available you as the AutoCAD Licence manager when you use OpenLM. A real-time view of how licenses are being utilized and whether they are active or idle. The ability to harvest licences. Licenses that have been booked out and are lying idle can be released back into the user pool. An option that enables the system to push an alert to the user who has experienced a feature denial as soon as a license becomes available. Reporting that highlights inefficient token usage, which can prove very costly, and which can be used to discuss AutoDesk’s reporting with your vendor representative. OpenLM can report on usage per second for AutoCAD. The ability to maintain the AutoDesk FlexLM Options file directly from OpenLM when you need to change access rights
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Other CAD and Engineering Software

OpenLM can manage many of the different engineering software tools in the organization’s software intentory, giving a consolidated view, rather than having to rely on each vendor’s own license management software. OpenLM is a solution tailored for engineering software which manages licenses from thousands of  vendors and AutoDesk is prominent on the list. Not only does OpenLM provide more information about AutoCAD than the AutoDesk license manager, it provides valuable data on other engineering software using many types of different license managers, such as .Dassault’s DSLS and Sentinel RMS.

Better License Optimization

If you are using OpenLM to manage AutoCAD licenses, your workload is reduced and your control is increased. The superior query and reporting functions enable you to optimize your AutoCAD ecosystem with confidence, based on facts and not guesswork. Your community of  CAD users are able to operate at maximum efficiency, with the minimum of downtime or availability. You can read more at https://www.openlm.com/openlm-for-autodesk/

For more information about how OpenLM can help you, the AutoCAD license manager / administrator, leave your details below and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

We’re happy to answer all your questions and help you understand how OpenLM

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Get in touch with us

Let us know what you would like to do. You will be able to discuss with one of our developers directly and decide what is best for your software and business.

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